The journey back out to IJburg is slow and faltering, like a metaphor for the state I’m in. The tram driver eases his ship along the icy rails with exaggerated care. At one point he stops, gets out holding a crowbar, and checks that the points on the interchange are properly aligned. Then off we slide again towards the bridge and past the huge sluice that controls the level of the inland waterways. The water in the drizzle of the night looks flat and dark and cold and terrible as suicide. I start to think gloomily of the impossibility of how to love everybody. Sex is the drive to separate, not combine, is my drift. Sex mixes genes not to unify, but to split and speciate. It is the drive towards form. The heavy potential of life that females carry in their unfertilized eggs is like an atom bomb, a seriously unstable element that gets knocked out of equilibrium by an explosion. A sex bomb! That leaves everyone in the vicinity not flattened, but reconfigured.
When I finally get to Katrina’s house, the first thing I see is Bamba’s car parked in the street. No one inside. Tyres still warm. So he’s there too – which means I’ll have to include him in this Lola/Katrina deal, dammit. I deep breathe my way up to the door to lower the anxiety and press the bell. Fronk opens it; “Fuck, not you as well,” he says. Inside there is an atmosphere of disarray and tension. Two enormous women are sitting on the tiny plywood kitchen chairs, the flesh of their thighs gently overlapping the seats, holding cans of beer. Fronk opens the fridge door and hands me one. “I suppose you want a glass,” he scowls.
What is this? Where’s Katrina?
“I’m Serine,” one of the women says. “And that’s Willow.” Willow says hi, with a little coquettish wave. “We’re old friends of Bamba. Do you know Bamba?” I nod at her. The lips in her big face are painted shiny red. I suddenly recall a couple of pigs I saw once standing in a field, female in front, male behind. They were both huge. She stood there still as a statue while he licked her arse noisily, lapping her up like food in a trough. “I guess I should say we’re associates, to be exact,” she says.
Just then little Jacob bursts into the kitchen and takes a flying leap onto Willow’s lap. She is so mountainously slippery that he slides straight off again, and in sliding clutches at her flesh to save himself. Handful over handful, he pulls himself all the way up again. She laughs and ruffles his hair and gives him a cavernous hug and holds him there while he wriggles. “We got to sit here, we got to wait.” She says to him.
Fronk leaves the room and we can hear him stamping up the stairs. Then stamping down again. He beckons at me from the door
“They’ve been here all day!” he hisses. “It’s driving Jacob mad. Did you see the way she was touching him?”
She was giving him a hug!” I say. There is a twitch of the puritan about Fronk. I can imagine him in a previous life pointing out witches to the authorities. “Who are they?”
“Two of Bamba’s donkeys,” he says. “They’ve been here all day. It’s driving Jacob mad,” he says again. “Katrina’s not here. She’s gone to the cuckoo’s nest with Bamba.”
“What happened?”
“I told you. We’re getting ready to go there now.”
“Can I bring Lola?”
Before he can say what do I care? Serine barges out of the kitchen jangling the car keys. “Come on, we’ll go get Lola,” she says to me.
“Who’s Lola?” calls out Willow.
“See you at the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Serine says to Fronk. He grunts. “See you later, little man,” she says to Jacob, and Fronk grabs him and hoists him off the ground to safety.
SERINE AND I GO FLYING DOWN THE HIGHWAY in sumptuous style, soft brown leather, polished walnut and satin chrome strips like an ocean liner, and a galaxy of little red lights making our faces glow in the dark. Serine’s wedged into the driving seat, voluptuously gripped by the seatbelt. Her bulk makes her look like a truck driver, but she handles the wheel with grace and her long pink nails are wrapped round a cigarette, which she draws at strongly with those fat red lips.
She pulls a long loop south to come up to the centre city via the road alongside the Amstel River, and her route takes us past the big hospital. I can see the grey masses of it three blocks away behind the trees lining the road. The hospital is, like the airport, a small city in itself; a collection of grey clad blocks with green glass looking like the future past. Punctuated by tall chimneys puffing invisible gases into the sky, and set in a wide landscape of kerbs and grass and asphalt marked up like the deck of a warship.
Not so long ago Jackie pitched up there in intensive care after a nasty episode which had us fearing for his life. He went the colour of a boiled beetroot and his heart rate pushed up to a hundred and ninety and we thought it was going to burst. He survived – but I remember going back there on the second day with a strong sense of disaster. I could feel the wind from death’s hammer slamming against the anvil. The Intensive Care Unit is a long distance from the main entrance. I had to go through a succession of automatic glass doors, down corridors, past department after department and their festivals of signage, and finally up an elevator with a tragic-comic collection of casualties in it. A care worn man in pyjamas pushing his drip stand and clutching a pack of cigarettes, wearing his name and number on a little plastic bracelet like an inmate. A whole family, aunts, uncles, parents, children, all carrying flowers. A mother holding the hand of a vacant eyed child with a shaved head. The stress was palpable. The taking it one day at a time existing right there in the suffering present was slathered all over everyone. Me too: I felt for us all, as I clutched Jackie’s box of chocolates in my hand.
When the door dinged open at floor seventeen and I emerged into the Intensive Care Unit reception I was confronted by a posse of policemen guarding the door. And one police woman, who was passing chocolates round to her mates. They looked at me suspiciously, and froze like statues. They had blue uniforms with straps, and black Berettas holstered in their belts. One of them searched me before I went in, pulling on a pair of bright blue rubber gloves to pat me all over. Is this usual?
Through the big doors, built to last with their toughened glass and their kick plates and their expensive ironmongery, and into a big, dimly lit ward full of curtains and medical machinery and empty beds. I passed the nursing station where five people dressed in pale blue smocks were sitting and talking quietly and eating chocolates. The place was awash with chocolates.
Straight ahead was a body covered in bandages and covered in folds of cloth connected up to a phalanx of life support robots, whose monitors clicked and blinked with each slow breath. He lay flat on his back with his eyes closed, looking like a Pharaoh in some ancient tomb. He was one of only two patients in there; and to the left, sitting up in a pool of light with his mother, was the other one. Trogo, smiling all over his face.
“Hey, lucky man,” I said. “The man who prays on the ocean is himself an ocean of peace.” He reached out and pulled me over close to him and the relief washed over me like a breaking wave.
Intensive care. It’s what the world needs. If we took intensive care of everything like these people do their patients, cliff face earth would be okay. But it’s not the interventions that make intensive care, not the armory of medication that is so impressive, it’s the intense observation. That’s what we should be doing to the world. Like a painter looks at it; closely observing. Every ten minutes a nurse came by and checked the numbers on Jackie’s machinery and the flow on his drip.
One of the nurses stayed longer than the others, and leant over the bed to lay healing hands upon him. She looked up at me. She and Lola exchanged smiles. “Is this him?” She said.
“This is him.”
I looked at Lola. “Okay, what are the police all for?” I said. They both laughed.
“I see what you mean!” Said the nurse. And then Lola:
“shhh! Idiot! The police are guarding that one over there!” pointing to the body lying on the catafalque on the other side of the room.
“That’s gangster number two. He’s going to give evidence against gangster number one,” said the nurse.
“If he survives,” said Lola.
Serine sits silently piloting the big car through the tiny streets while I’m remembering all this. She looks over and asks me what I’m smiling about. And I tell her I was thinking about the cuckoo’s nest. I’ve only just got the joke. On the way out of the intensive care when I passed the nursing station, one lonely chocolate was sitting in its foil in the box, like the last egg in the nest. The survivor. “Take it,” They said. “No one likes to take the last one in here. It’s unlucky.” I stuck it in my mouth and sneaked a quick look at gangster number two. Still breathing. Next, click, next, click, next, went the monitor; life in the Intensive Care ward is so finely balanced it’s measured in breaths, in by out by in by out – like transcendental meditation. Except that in there, becoming one with the universe is what they’re trying to stop.